[scribus] Preferred workflow for mostly text book

[JLuc]

Le 18/02/2014 20:45, john Culleton a écrit :
> I am trying my first real book interior in
> Scribus, and the page count will exceed 128.
> There will be text plus lots of black and white
> illos. I will use 1.5.0.
>   So what is the preferred workflow:
> 1. Type each chapter externally and import as text
> into a set of linked pages. Then export the
> chapter as pdf.
> 2. Type each chapter using story editor. Then
> export the chapter as pdf.
> 3. Type the whole book in one document.

I use a mixture of 1 and 3, depending on the book.

I type the text in external documents (libreoffice or googledocs)
and import them as text (without style import)
I do the layout then.

With 1) i setup a script to merge the produced PDFs with pdftk when required.

With 3) when the SLAs are ready and before producing the PDF,
i merge the 10 to 20 SLAs in 3 or 4 big SLAs (Pages > Import)
(entry and summaries, first part, second part, last part)
I redo manualy all links (because #11110)
and sometime i clean the duplicated and unused styles (#11814, #11420)
but there should be no problem if the styles have the same definition
in all merged parts.
And then i produce the 3 or 4 PDFs that i send as is to the printer,
without merging them further.

> I am concerned about two things: speed/ease of
> production and size of the ultimate pdf. It seems
> to me that if I merge chapters using pdftk
> then there will be a lot of repetition in the pdf
> of fonts etc.

Merging the PDFs is fully scriptable, fast and reliable,
and less tricky than merging the SLAs,
but i dont like keeping lots of SLAs.
IMO, fonts are not that big compared to scribus produced PDFs.

JLuc